Pedro Zylbersztajn (SMACT ’18) was featured in Art In America’s ArtNews, in an article by Phoebe Chen. An excerpt is below:
“Language is the bottom line of all my work,” Pedro Zylbersztajn told [Phoebe Chen] over Zoom this spring, “and also the beginning of it.” From such a linguistic genesis, critical expressions have emerged in modes as varied as drawing, video, installation, and performance, but Zylbersztajn had been grappling with language and the way it moves through the world—as knowledge, as information, as rhetoric—for years before he took up art making.
Born in São Paulo in 1993, Zylbersztajn studied graphic design and printmaking before working in art publishing, which amplified his interest in discursive networks as a locus of creative potential. In 2016 he enrolled in the MIT graduate program in Art, Culture, and Technology, which he found a paradigm-shifting experience. There, Zylbersztajn learned to consider how “the materiality and discursivity” of his practice could “feed off each other,” he told me. Instead of working within circumscribed forms and familiar processes to produce objects, like publishing books or prints, he began to consider the very motions of doing, thinking through actions—like circulation, collection, and consumption—as well as the forms that these verbs produce.
Full article can be found here.
Zylbersztajn was also featured in Art in America’s Fall “New Talent” Issue Featuring 20 Artists to Watch.
